According to Stanislav Shabaiev, founder of investment holding company STNL Media Invest Holding, the biggest AI opportunities for investors may not be in companies that call themselves AI businesses. He argues that AI is becoming a layer across the entire economy, which shifts the question from finding the next AI startup to finding businesses that can use the technology to create a meaningful advantage in their existing markets.
Shabaiev points to industries with a digital shopfront but a manual back office, where value sits not in adding another interface but in removing the manual work between systems. Defensibility, he says, comes from proprietary data, deep integration into a customer's daily process, and high switching costs. He also warns investors to ask which budget is paying for the product: experimental AI budgets are cut first, while operational budgets reflect real demand.
His own test is blunt: switch the product off for a week and see if work stops. He is less interested in pilots than in renewals, because a renewal shows that a customer is willing to be accountable for the product. The eventual winners, he predicts, may be companies in slower-digitising sectors like manufacturing, construction and agriculture that apply AI so effectively it disappears into the product. They may not describe themselves as AI companies at all—just very good companies using a powerful new tool.